Who's Online on the Site, Without Tidio: Live Presence and Visitor History with Firebase

A client wanted to know who was on their site and on which page, the way Tidio's widget showed them — but without paying for a Tidio subscription, on an external WordPress site that doesn't use Firebase. The result: an external tracker hooked to an independent Firebase project, live presence via onDisconnect , persistent history in Firestore with IP geolocation — and a final debugging session where a browser CORS error was masking a server crash caused by an empty string instead of null . The context The client already had a third-party live-chat script installed on their site, and that's where the idea came from: "can we see who's on the site and on which page, without using that service?" Two constraints made the request less trivial than usual: the site hadn't been migrated to my usual stack yet — it was still running on WordPress, on different hosting — and there was no intention of introducing Firebase on the WordPress side. Step 1 — understanding what a live-chat widget actually does Before building anything, it was worth looking at what the already-installed script actually did. The tag pasted into the site was just a small loader: it creates a hidden iframe, loads the widget's real "brain" inside it from the provider's servers, which then connects via websocket to their backend to stream presence, current page and events in real time. The interesting part — "see who's on the site and on which page" — isn't in the public script: it all lives server-side at the provider, behind authentication, a proprietary dashboard and a subscription. There was nothing to "detach" from that service: it's client code tied to someone else's backend by design. But the pattern itself — a script tag hooking into an external backend — is exactly what's needed to build the same feature independently, and it fits well with Firebase, which has a native presence mechanism built for precisely this. Step 2 — live presence with Firebase Realtime Database Firebase Realtime Database has a